Finally, after 6 years of hard work, the W3C has released the Candidate Recommendation specs for XQuery 1.0, XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0. Does this mean that the recommendations are done? No, not yet. But it means that we reached an important milestone. Now everyone is officially invited to implement the specs, run the test suite, and provide feedback. Within the next couple of months, we will see which ones of the features will have at least two implementations with the same result and what may be underspecified or will not find an implementation.
Here are the specs:
We also release a new working draft for the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Full-Text part:
As Michael Champion mentioned, the design by committee approach to standardization is sometimes slow, especially if it is somewhat feature-driven and not date-driven, and it is frought with compromise decisions, but I think the XQuery, XPath and XSLT specs are actually in pretty good shape and provide lots of useful functionality.
Since we now ship SQL Server 2005 with its XQuery subset and are planning the next release, I would like to encourage you to check out the XQuery specs (including the Full-Text specs) and let me know what functionality you want us to implement with the highest priority in the next release of SQL Server.